Editorial

Child Everlasting

On the Omnipotent Humility That Saves an Old & Infantile World by Anthony Esolen

Every Sunday our pastor proceeds up the aisle behind a troop of altar boys
and lectors, one of the boys holding up a five-foot cross and another holding
up the lectionary from which we will hear the word of God. Not on Christmas,
though.

On that day, the pastor himself raises up something for the people to behold:
From beneath the folds of his outer vestment he presents to the congregation
a small statue of the Christ child. When he reaches the foot of the apse, he
places the child in a crèche and kneels, while the people all sing that
old carol that calls us to come to Bethlehem and adore the king of angels.

It is a simple gesture, yet extraordinarily moving; when I first saw it at
a midnight Mass, I was surprised almost to tears. The Lord we worship is a
little child. How can this be?

When the shepherds were told, in grand style, to go to the village and seek
a babe lying in a manger, what wonder did they behold? They had seen babies
before, and when they saw the child Jesus, unless they saw with the eyes of
faith, they saw an average baby boy, with his mother and his father, both weary
from the long journey.

Yet swaddled up in those bands of humanity was Omnipotence. He who had spoken
the world into existence now came into that world as an infant, literally a
being without speech—the Word made speechless. He whose right arm upholds
at every moment every creature in its existence, now could not clasp a pebble,
even could he move his hands from the cloth that hemmed him in.

The Child’s Witness

But can we see the wonder from the other direction? It may be that the child
Jesus does not conceal omnipotence so much as reveal what it really means to
be omnipotent. That’s because the Word through whom were made the heavens
and the earth was from before the foundations of the world the Word who would
be made flesh: It is a world made to be redeemed by that child.

If it is not stretching a word to say so, creation itself shows us not only
the power of God, but his mighty humility, as he condescends
to make what is not God, but what is for him, and, in the case of
man, what is capable of loving him. More than that: he is a God who has granted
man the sublime power to be the means whereby he brings into the world an immortal
soul.

Except for our first parents and for the second Adam, no immortal soul has
ever (until our recent experiments in hominiculture) been brought into the
world unless by the holy act that God intended for the expression of the love
and union of man and woman. Any child, then, if we could see aright, gives
witness to true power—the power of God, inseparable from his wisdom and
his love.

At the least, the child—any child—is distantly like God in its
unconsciousness of sin. For sin is an aging thing; but our God, the ancient
of days, is himself first and new.

But the world is old and infantile. It gabbles, and says nothing. It craves
power, and its babyish hands grope about the empty air. We say we like children,
and we make our institutions puerile to prove it, but we have as few children
as possible, and those few we keep well away from our business, our careers,
our pacifiers and rattles and dolls. Don’t touch, don’t touch!

Here in the dead of our winter it would do us well to remember that every
passing thing in this world derives its true meaning from that Child; that
upon the boy asleep in the manger depends all of man’s history; that
at every conception, time is impregnated with eternity, and again there comes
into this world an immortal image of him who also came into the world, who
burst the barrier of the world at the moment he took flesh in the womb of Mary,
and who was born a babe long ago, to redeem us and show us a glimpse of that
ancient youth he never can lose. •

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of The Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has also translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's The Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

“Child Everlasting” first appeared in the December 2007 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

Letters Welcome: One of the reasons Touchstone exists is to encourage conversation among Christians, so we welcome letters responding to articles or raising matters of interest to our readers. However, because the space is limited, please keep your letters under 400 words. All letters may be edited for space and clarity when necessary. letters@touchstonemag.com